Another use of the term “reconciliation” is in the accounting realm. At the end of a business tax-year a bookkeeper must balance the company’s financial books. That’s simply making the income and the outgo equal; the money received must equal money spent. And that has to include bad debts where a customer doesn’t pay for what he received. The books have to balance –it’s the law!
As an example, a retail business spends money to buy merchandise that it hopes to sell to customers. Normally, the bookkeeper makes entries under the “expenses” column for money spent buying from his supplier. Similarly he makes entries in the “received” column for money received from the customer.
But occasionally a customer buys some merchandise on credit and later can’t pay back what he owes. You would see the same effect from a customer writing a bad check. In such cases, the bookkeeper has to record these bad debts, or losses, by making an entry under the received column indicating that the debt was paid by the business itself. The debt is written off. As unfair as it seems, this is all part of reconciling financial records and it’s required every tax period!
What did He pay for and what did He use for payment? He paid for our sins with his Son’s life. You know, the wages of our sin is death. Well it’s our sins that He paid for. Why can’t we pay our own sins? We never had an eternal life to pay with. Only God had spiritual life. And that’s what He used to pay for them!
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them. (2 Corinthians 5:17-19)
No doubt you’ve heard this old story many times leading up to what God has doe for mankind. He –like the businessman– paid a debt he didn’t owe to cover the debt owed by a person who couldn’t pay. That’s what God describes in 2 Corinthians 5:17-21. He paid that debt with the death of His Son since we obviously couldn’t pay it ourselves.
